Vida Fakin

In collaboration with Vida Fakin’s family, the Living Field is pleased to open these pages on our web site from April 2016.

Vida Fakin, nee Lojk, was born on 6 April 1915 in Ljubljana, Slovenia and died on 10 June 2001.

Her art and life will be presented in the coming weeks and months, beginning with an exhibition of her works held in 2015 at the Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her family arranged for the exhibition guide (leaflet) to be translated from Slovene into English and it can be found at this link on this site: Exhibition Ljubljana 2015: Slovene Identity – elevated into a cosmic vision.

Editor’s note

Travelling in Slovenia, the massive scale of the Julian Alps and extensive upland pasture is repeatedly reduced to a human scale by rural hand-works: orchards, enclosure, sheds, woodpiles, tiers of bee-hives, but most of all by the many hay-racks that are built to hold and dry grass that has been cut for feeding animals over the winter.

These personal, individual, human structures give the place an identity rarely found in Europe. The ikons of rural activity in Britain tend to be from a previous time – the mounds and circles of stone and bronze ages or the rigs and field patterns of recent centuries no longer worked.

In Slovenia, the ikons are alive and present. And it is these that the artist Vida Fakin has sought to capture in her paintings. But not as conventional landscape art. Agriculture exists on flows of energy and matter and it is these that the artist captures. Nothing is static – accumulation and flux are evident among hay-racks, mountains, forests, the moon and the landscape’s fantastic creatures.

Links on this web site

Acknowledgements

Images and photographs on these pages were provided by Vida Fakin’s family – Mojca Suklje, Helena Suklje, Marko Debeljak.

{Ed … page in progress, subject to change and development, last updated 31 December 2017}

LIVING FIELD IMAGES

Contrasting hayrack and Slovenian landscape : Vida's page on the Living Field (click image) gives more examples of her art

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